Nobel Winner Laments Poverty of Russian Science

By MICHAEL WINES

Published: October 12, 2000

MOSCOW, Oct. 11—
One day after becoming the first Russian since 1978 to win a Nobel Prize for science, Zhores Ivanovich Alferov bitterly charged the Kremlin today in a speech before Parliament with failing to spend enough money on basic scientific research.

His speech to the lower house, or Duma, where he is a member of the Communist faction, underscored the bittersweet nature of his award, for physics research conducted almost entirely when Russia was under Communist rule.

Since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, sending the economy into a tailspin from which it has only briefly emerged, state funding for science has slowed to a trickle.

In his remarks today, Dr. Alferov (pronounced ahl-FYO-roff), 70, was unsparing. He noted at one point that the Kremlin's proposed budget for 2001 would spend far more money on free housing for Duma legislators -- about $40 million -- than on research buildings and equipment for the nation's once cherished scientists.

''Just think again,'' he said. ''Think one more time. How can it be that the draft budget foresees 50 percent higher allocation for the Finance Ministry, tax services and other financial bodies representing pure bureaucrats than for the whole of Russian science?

''How can it happen -- and I hope that the deputies will support me -- that the draft budget foresees allocating 1.1 billion rubles for the construction of a special block of flats for the deputies? The amount is more than four times higher than all capital investments for Russian science. This block of flats alone might give us an opportunity to build several laboratories.''

It was far from the first time that Dr. Alferov, who has directed the Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute in St. Petersburg for the last 13 years, has criticized the Moscow government for neglecting science. In a 1996 interview, he said that the Ioffe Institute's budget had been slashed since the Soviet collapse five years earlier. In 1998, after the ruble plunged in value, he said that ''the situation in the scientific sphere is catastrophic.''

''The electronics industry, which I know very well, has been destroyed,'' he said. ''Scientists, including at our institute, continue to work. But they are mainly filling orders coming in from other countries.''

In a telephone interview on Tuesday evening from his country home outside St. Petersburg, he said the nation still had a strong scientific tradition. But ''to our pity, frequently our leadership in the old time -- and especially right now -- did not understand really how important science is for Russia.'' He added: ''I hope the awarding of the Nobel Prize will help to change that.''

He said he has known President Vladimir V. Putin, a fellow St. Petersburg native, for 10 years, and said he hoped to persuade him to devote more money to research. He was scheduled to meet Mr. Putin again on Thursday, in a ceremony honoring his achievement. But he sidestepped a question asking if he believed that the president would grant his wish. ''I like to joke that we are a country of optimists, because the pessimists have all left,'' Dr. Alferov said.

The Nobel Prize is both a personal achievement and a vindication of the importance of the St. Petersburg research center he directs, one of the leading scientific centers of both Soviet and Russian times.

Three other Nobel awards have been given to scientists who worked at the institute or began their careers there, including the last Russian to win a science prize, the physicist Pyotr Kapitsa.

For Russians, the prize was a patriotic tonic at a time when back-to-back technological disasters -- the sinking of the nuclear submarine Kursk and a huge fire at the 1,772-foot Ostankino television tower -- have created something close to a scientific inferiority complex.

While Dr. Alferov comes from a family of committed Communists, he was a member of the centrist Our Russian Home political bloc until it began to fragment in the second half of the 90's.

His scientific life has been distinctly international in tone, distinguished by close cooperation and, he said, fierce competition with physicists in the United States, Germany and elsewhere.

One scientific history recalled that in 1970, scientists at one of the United States' premier research institutes, Bell Laboratories, privately celebrated a landmark advance in creating a room-temperature laser -- only to discover that Dr. Alferov's lab had done the same a month earlier. It was Dr. Alferov's work on lasers in the 1960's and 70's that produced many of the scientific breakthroughs that led to the Nobel award this week.

Dr. Alferov was born on March 15, 1930, in the Soviet town of Vitebsk, in what is now Belarus, to a sawmill worker and his wife. He graduated from the Lenin Electrotechnical Institute in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in 1952 and immediately began work at the Ioffe Institute, later earning a doctorate there in physics and mathematics.

Since then, he has produced more than 50 inventions in semiconductor technology and collected an array of awards, including the 1972 Lenin Prize -- one of the Soviet Union's highest honors -- and the 1978 Hewlett-Packard Europhysics Prize. He spent six months in the United States in 1970 and '71 working at the University of Illinois.

He is married to a sociologist and has two children, a son in Russia and a daughter in California.

Like many scientists, he was a strong supporter of Mikhail S. Gorbachev's effort to overhaul Soviet society, and was elected to the Soviet Congress of People's Deputies in 1990 on a platform of freeing scientific research from government control and restrictions on foreign cooperation. That came to pass with the collapse of the Soviet government, but hardly in the manner scientists had hoped.

Dr. Alferov re-entered politics in 1995, going to Parliament as a representative of the scientific community. But he quickly became a critic of the Kremlin's financial conduct and commitment to science.

He said he would give much of his share of the money from the Nobel award -- about $228,000 -- to educational programs at the institute.